A joint UK-US team of researchers claim to have created a new type of organic polymer which could supercede silicon compounds as the standard material for making certain types of electronic system. The major edge it has over silicon is that it can be manufactured at low temperatures with little waste. It could also be ‘printed’ as a fluid using conventional inkjet technologies, putting an end to expensive and error-prone lithography techniques and enabling it to be used on flexible substrates. Maybe ‘electronic paper’ won’t be vapourware forever.
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Multilayered PPCBs (Plastic Printed Circuit Boards) would offer good value in the low-speed PCB, analogue and controls industries. These could be developed by the printing and over printing of a flexible substrate with conductive and non-conductive layers. These layers would create wells where they would provide interconnections between the different layers. The use of N and P type conductors could form embedded components cutting down the total parts count where these parts will perform satisfactorily for the intended purpose.